At the end of 2011, Airbnb was entering hyper-growth with 13 international offices and over a million nights booked in 182 countries. But instead of popping champagne, Airbnb’s leadership enlisted Rebecca Sinclair, Head of User Experience Research and Design, to lead a nights-and-weekends initiative called Snow White to help Airbnb disrupt itself and keep its product-market fit. The result changed Airbnb’s entire product strategy and opened them up to develop new business categories, like Airbnb Experiences.

“Product-market fit is the only thing that matters,” according to investor Marc Andreessen. Why? “Because,” says Sinclair, “if nobody wants what you’re selling, you don’t have a business. ” And yet, many companies fail to master the art of design thinking and user research to find and keep product-market fit. Fewer still can hone this process to expand a company into new business verticals that reach fresh audiences, all while being believably “on brand.” I wanted to learn more about Airbnb’s approach, so I sat down with Rebecca Sinclair to hear about how companies can use design to master product-market fit.

Rebecca Sinclair: It was Christmas break at the end of 2011 and we were exploding -- which comes with a lot of growing pains and challenges. Our CEO, Brian Chesky, picked up Walt Disney’s biography and was struck that Disney used storyboards to focus his team and create their first full-length animation film, Snow White. When he came back from the break, he asked us how we could use storyboards at Airbnb and, as a former designer for IDEO, I interpreted this as a customer journey. I thought it was a fascinating way to focus our vision through something visually compelling. It was also an opportunity to put human-centered design and creative methods at the heart of Airbnb’s strategy and culture, which excited me because I believed this would make Airbnb a landmark company -- not just because of its product, but also the core process for how the entire team worked.

Joffrion: How did you get to the “ah-ha” that made Snow White so impactful?

Sinclair: The “ah-ha” came through by practicing design thinking. A group of us were in the synthesis phase, crowded around a bunch of sticky notes that represented the moments of our customer journey. At the time, like a lot of tech startups, we called the website and the app “the product” -- which was both limited and limiting. Suddenly, we were looking at a journey through these sticky notes, imagining our customers booking, and we saw that the moments that mattered most were offline. This offline experience -- this trip to Paris or stay in a treehouse -- is what they were buying from us, not a website or an app. That’s when we started to say, “the product is the trip” and began shifting our perspective. We could see completely new possibilities in how we thought about which problems to solve and what to build.

Joffrion: How did this change Airbnb’s core business strategy?

Sinclair: When we realized the product was the trip, we started to see Airbnb as a lifestyle company that could believably extend into more aspects of the trip, like Airbnb Experiences. But the real genius is that storyboards became part of our culture and helped make Airbnb a resilient, creative organization. When we presented the Snow White storyboards to the team, we shared why we were creating this end-to-end experience and asked employees where they affected the story. Giving people problems instead of to-do lists empowered them to examine their work through a new lens. They were invited to be creative and come up with new ideas and possibilities that leadership could never have imagined. You can’t know the future in such a fast-moving organization or in a global market. And, when you’re truly disrupting, you don’t want to be limited by what you think your company can be right now. Snow White brought human-centered design to all levels of the organization, and it is still used and shared today.

Joffrion: Product-market fit is something companies really struggle to find and keep. How has your work helped Airbnb stay ahead of the game in a changing market?

Sinclair: Storyboards gave the team a framework for imagining an experience. And this has become a human-centered way to think about innovation. You can’t build products that people want without a strong point of view, so understanding that Airbnb's product was the trip gave the team the right constraints to focus on innovation that rolled up to our brand promise -- even as the markets shifts. We couldn’t have done this without first understanding how the customer saw our product: that the product was the trip. This allowed us to see what kinds of brand and product extensions were believable to customers and fit into our brand.

Joffrion: What advice do you have for companies who are struggling with using research to find (or keep) product-market fit?

I am a brand and communications consultant who has spent the last decade working with startups in San Francisco, New York, Portland, and New Orleans, most notably Airbnb where I was among the first 50 to join the team. On the way to making Airbnb a household name, I convince...